Gentle Lies
by NinthFeather
Summary: "She always told us gentle lies." Izumi on Fullmoon, fairy tales, and the fact that things that seem too good to be true usually are. Spoilers for volume 4, and angst.


_A/N: Wow, it's been awhile. But I've decided to revisit Full Moon O Sagashite, mostly because, after listening to "Yasashii Uso" (Gentle Lie) by Chrome Shelled five or six times, I __**needed**__ to write something with it, and this was the series that I thought fit it the best. So, this isn't really a songfic, but the last line is basically a line from the song, with genders and pluralizing changed to fit in the story. There are spoilers here for the end of volume four of the manga, so press that "back" arrow if you aren't that far in the series yet. Oh, and massive amounts of angst, too. Enjoy!_

**Gentle Lies**

Mitsuki Koyama doesn't look like a liar. Her wide blue eyes seem frozen in perpetual surprise, and her smile only wavers when she hears about someone else's sadness…

I've never seen her so much as frown for herself; every once in a while, she'll smile a little more sadly if she's talking about losing her parents, or missing Eiichi, or her throat cancer, but she never frowns on her own behalf. I think she must cry, sometimes, but only when she's alone; knowing her, she doesn't want to burden anyone else with her sadness.

She projects innocence, naiveté, an aura of trustworthiness that makes the idea of her lying inconceivable.

I guess that's how we fell for it.

To be fair, it wasn't just me she fooled. Takuto and Meroko believed her, too. And so did she, I think. After a while, she got caught up in her own fairytale, of a pop-star princess singing to call her faraway prince home.

It was such a beautiful story. And we all wanted to believe in it—we three _shinigami_, who already sacrificed our last chances at happy endings, and Mitsuki, a lonely, dying girl who just wanted to see the boy she loved one more time.

I'm sure she thought about telling us the truth. But by then, we were all so wrapped up in the false beauty of the story she'd told us that telling us the truth would have been cruel.

Of course, letting us find out on our own was cruel, too…she seems so innocent and good; I never knew she could do something like that.

But it was still better than telling us outright; than admitting that, all along, she'd had us chasing after someone who we couldn't bring back to her. That her dream of a reunion with Eiichi could never come true, that it was as doomed as the dreams the three of us had left behind at the end of our lives.

All along, she'd been trying to convince us that being a _shinigami_ wasn't a punishment, that this existence-but-not-life wasn't just a sadistic deity's idea of a joke. But knowing what I know now, that Mitsuki can't see Eiichi, not ever again, I can't help wondering if she's wrong. Because this—watching her smile despite everything, watching her push herself to the brink of exhaustion in trying to help other people—it _hurts_, badly, as badly as the memories of my life. It almost hurts more, in some ways, because those hurts are old scars that refuse to close, while this…this is like being sliced open, slowly.

And now, there's a part of me that's given up hope, because if someone as unbelievably _good_ as Mitsuki can't have happiness, what chances do I have at it?

If I answer that question honestly, I'll lose hope, and that will hurt her—and it's not as if she needs more pain.

I hated her, because she kept smiling, but now I know that she was only smiling because she wanted to see smiles on the faces of the people around her. That's what she really wants, I think, even more than seeing Eiichi again.

And so, she spun the fairytale of Fullmoon for us, and we acted it out along with her, a pageant that, in the end, had no more substance than the light of Mitsuki's namesake. And she used the threads of that tale to hold us together when we were falling apart, to keep us afloat when we were drowning. She constantly tried to keep us safe, even though we are the _shinigami _who are already dead, and she is the one who is still alive and dying. She never stopped telling us that everything would be all right, that there was a happy ending out there for us somewhere.

She always told us gentle lies.

_A/N: Takuto was supposed to narrate this, but then it started sounding more like Izumi to me, so I went with it. If you're wondering why I didn't mention Jonathan as one of those who believed Mitsuki, it's because Jonathan never really seems to. He just sort of floats in the background and smiles. And of course, later on…oops, spoilers are bad. Anyhow, please leave me a review!_


End file.
